Tuning Your Guitar

One of the most important things you can do as a guitarist is learn how to tune your guitar. There is nothing worse than listening to someone play out of tune, it can make a great guitarist sound terrible. When first learning to tune your guitar it can be fairly difficult, I suggest purchasing an electronic guitar tuner or use some of the tuners available online. Even if you do purchase a tuner you should learn how to tune your instrument without any electronic devices. In this lesson I will teach you one of the oldest methods I learned when I first started out.

Here is an awesome tuner and chord generator you can use to to help you tune your guitar or help identify chords you are learning.

Standard Guitar Tuning

Step 1
First you must get your 6th string the largest string in tune. You can do this using a piano and sounding the E note below middle C on the piano and tuning your string to match that tone. Once you have you E string in tune then you can move on to get the remaining strings in tune.
Step 2
Press the fifth fret of the 6th string E and tune your 5th string A to match the tone it produces. The note you are sounding when pressing the fifth fret is A, the same as your 5th string.
Step 3
Once your 5th string A is in tune repeat the same procedure, press the 5th fret of the A string and tune the 4th string D until the tones match.
Step 4
Once your 4th String D is in tune repeat the same procedure as above to tune your 3rd String G.
Step 5
This string you follow a slightly different procedure, you have to press the fourth fret of the G string and then tune your 2nd string B to match the tone. This is the only string you have to do this alteration with.
Step 6
In this step press the 5th fret of the 2nd string B and tune your first string E to match the tone it produces.
Note: Sometimes you will need to go back through all the strings and retune them again as they can de tune themselves slightly as you tune through all the strings. As you become a better musician over the years you will become better at tuning your instrument by ear.